


there you are

by taizi



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, I aim to please, M/M, Past lives are involved so there is also past character death, Reincarnation, the reincarnation au no one wanted
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-09-12 20:16:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9089029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taizi/pseuds/taizi
Summary: In another life, Viktor's first words will be “Commemorative photo?” and Yuuri will meet him in the middle of a crowded room, laughing like their love is a new taste in his mouth.-In which Viktor remembers all of their past lives, and Yuuri only remembers one.





	1. the promise

“I'm scared,” Viktor whispers. He's never been more scared.

Yuuri's wrist feels frail in Viktor's strong hand, his pulse fainter with every passing moment. Yuuri opens his eyes, an amber that leans closer to gold, and even their color is fading. Viktor swallows hard, his own heart racing.

His marvel is dying. So much magic packed into so small a person, and it was no wonder Yuuri's core had burned out so quickly, so young.

“Please,” he says, uselessly. “I can't be without you.”

“Oh, no.” The warm hearth in Yuuri's eyes burns. “Oh, Viktor – you will _never_ be without me, understand?”

“I _don't_ understand,” he cries out. There are tears on his face, dripping onto the thin blanket, and he cradles Yuuri's delicate hand in both of his own. “Please, please, Yuuri,” he sobs. “Tell me what I can do to keep you. I'm so scared.”

Yuuri is quiet for a long moment, long enough for a silently weeping Viktor to feel ashamed of his outburst, and then his hand in Viktor's grips tight.

“Come here,” he says, very soft.

Viktor doesn't hesitate to climb onto the bed, arranging his weight carefully in the narrow space. Yuuri strokes Viktor's long yellow hair with weak fingers, something absurdly tender in his dimming eyes.

“You are so loved, Viktor. It's impossible, how much I love you.” He presses a kiss to the palm of Viktor's captive hand and blinks wetly. His soft mouth trembles as he continues, “And now – the magic is going away, my dear, but I think I can give you this.”

His gift hums around them. Viktor startles, leaning back to stare. “Yuuri – ”

“You'll remember, so don't be scared,” he says, and tears slip down his cheeks. _He's_ afraid, for the first time since the healers said he would die, and groping for handfuls of Viktor's clothes with hands that shake. “I'll do this for you, but you'll have to find me next time.”

Viktor leans down to kiss him, on every inch of his face. Isn't sure Yuuri knows what he's saying at this point, isn't sure the marvel isn't already lost to delirium. It sounds like Yuuri is giving him advice for the future, as though somehow they might meet again. But he can't bear the desperation in that beloved face, so he promises, “I'll find you.”

Yuuri looks up with those lovely honey eyes, only barely gold with the scant gift he has left, and stares for a long moment at something Viktor isn't sure he's really seeing.

“Oh, how pretty,” Yuuri finally says, surprised as he thumbs a loose lock of Viktor's hair. “It'll be silver now.”

“Okay,” Viktor says brokenly, kissing his fading lover again. “It'll be silver.”

“I wonder,” Yuuri starts, and trails off. Viktor presses lips to his hairline, and holds him as tight as he dares; trying not to come apart completely with the force of this heartbreak. “Viktor?”

“I'm here, darling.”

He curls his arms up around Viktor, hands closing in the back of his tunic. He fits so perfectly against Viktor's chest, eyes fluttering as though he's about to fall asleep. Something about it makes him smile, a soft curve of his mouth against Viktor's neck.

“I think,” he says slowly, “I think I'll know this. Bring your heart next to mine, Viktor, and I'll know it.”

This intimate, shared space between the two of them feels like a magic all its own, and Viktor presses a hand over Yuuri's heartbeat, memorizing this moment as best he can to keep with him on cold nights. He holds him, and breathes in the smell of his hair, as the candle burns down and the shadows around them grow larger. The light in Yuuri's eyes gets farther and farther away until he's hardly more than an empty husk in Viktor's arms, a beautiful remnant. Viktor doesn't know how to breathe through this pain.

“Remember,” Yuuri murmurs, drifting peacefully. “Stay close to me.”

The castellan finds them both in that small room at daybreak, Viktor hollow-eyed with grief and Yuuri dearly departed in his arms. Yuuri is buried on a bright winter afternoon, and Viktor wears heartache like a cloak for all the years left in his own life.

Wishing he shared in Yuuri's impossible belief, that one day they would meet again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here's my contribution to the fandom,,, yet another soulmate au. it probably wont be very long. im just kind of playing it by ear
> 
> i left things intentionally vague bcus viktor still has some Stuff to figure out (he'll get there eventually) so let me know if you have questions ;w ;


	2. the drowning man

At its very heart, magic is kind—more generous than its sister, science, and infinitely more forgiving.

And while it was never meant to be passed along from one body to the next—while it shouldn't be _possible_ for the gift to settle into a host born without a magical core—this one time, it does.

Because magic is kind, and Yuuri's gift knew centuries of loving the same man; over and over and over again, as fiercely as the very first time.

It's impossible for Viktor to carry what his Yuuri carried, and yet—

 

* * *

 

He wakes up with a wild start; an unsettling sensation, to be sure, because he was awake already.

For a wheeling, wrenching moment everything he knows is unfamiliar, the space and the people around him and his own pale hands when he catches himself against a wall. There are voices swelling up around him in alarm, but they're speaking a language he doesn't understand, and he doesn't know who they are, he doesn't know where he is, he doesn't know where he's supposed to be.

Voices swarming closer, talking at him, blurred faces creased with worry, but none of them are who he needs. Someone should be here who isn't. Someone precious is gone. Someone beautiful and golden and beyond words, and that could only be _—_

“Oh, my Yuuri,” he gasps, ugly and choking. A lifetime of _missing him_ pressed into the space of a single moment and he crumples under the weight of it. Hands catch him, prop him upright, but there's no room in his chest left to _breathe_. 

“Where is he? Please? My Yuuri—”

 _I can't do this again,_ he thinks, nonsensically. _I can't live through this more than once._

A clatter of agitated conversation, the slamming of a door, the rustle of plastic bags falling, running footsteps drawing closer and the dull _thud_ of a person catching themselves against a wall, and then, finally, _finally,_

“Viktor? Oh, Viktor, what—what _happened,_ what's—”

Hands cradle his face, a touch as familiar as the sight of the sky, and he breaks.

Viktor falls into him the moment he's close enough, grabbing fistfuls of Yuuri's soft sweater and clinging to him like a drowning man. He's struggling for air and sobbing, pressing a wet face into the hollow of Yuuri's throat, and it feels like it's been years and years and _years and years—_

"Yuuri," he cries, " _Yuuri."_

“Shh, Vitya, it's alright,” Yuuri whispers, shaken and scared and so full of love it doesn't make sense that he doesn't come apart with it. “Please don't cry, I'm here.”

 

* * *

 

It isn't linear, this link between lives—no straight line he can trace across a map.

The magic was never truly his, and so their beginning together is rocky as it stretches and shifts to settle into a soul not meant to bear it in the first place. Viktor is no marvel, but someday he'll carry it with as much grace and good humor as Yuuri once did. 

Until then, it will come back to him in snatches of confused memory, nonconsecutive and disjointed. The very first thing he remembers the very first time is a staggering sense of loss, of pain and grief and yearning, without context and without closure. 

It gets easier from there.

But it will take three lifetimes for Viktor to fully understand the gift that Yuuri gave him. 

 

* * *

 

“It was a bad dream,” Yuuri tells him. He's laying in the tight circle of Viktor's arms without protest, tender and giving down to his bones. He's so soft and lovely, so irrevocably _good._   “I would never leave you, Viktor, nothing could make me leave you alone like that."

For an instant that doesn't make sense, Viktor wants to argue. You might but you would never  _mean_ to, he almost says. You did but it wasn't your  _fault_. 

Confused and disquieted, Viktor only nods. Yuuri is right, of course, it must have been a dream. It's just--a dream has never made him feel like that before. Like his legs were cut out from under him and his insides were scraped raw and he _knew_ beyond shadow of a doubt that Yuuri was gone to a place he could never reach.

Trembling, Viktor curls him closer. Their bed is huge and they're only taking up a quarter of it right now. Yuuri huffs out a quiet sound, something between a chuckle and a sigh, and presses a kiss against Viktor's jawline.

"Let's talk about something else," he says reasonably, sounding very much like Viktor after one of Yuuri's own panic attacks. The role reversal would be amusing if Viktor were capable of finding the humor in it right now.

Obediently, he casts around for a topic away from that frightening nightmare. Yuuri waits, absently slipping warm hands under Viktor's shirt to rub his back. 

"Yuuri," he finally says, slowly, "do you believe in magic?"

He can almost feel Yuuri's dumbfounded blink, and it brings a smile to his face. Yuuri shifts back just enough to look up at him, eyes round behind his glasses. "Is this a trick question?"

"Of course not."

"Well, on an academic level, I would say that I do," he says thoughtfully. "I mean, we were taught about it in school. There are countless ancient texts salvaged from all over the world that include accounts of magic. It's died out since then, but people who hail from once-gifted bloodlines usually show signs, like your silver hair," he adds, with an affectionate tug at a lock of Viktor's long bangs. "Which makes as much sense as _anything,_ doesn't it? If any one person was magical in this world, it would be you."

Viktor can't help but beam at him, a pleased pink flushing his face with warmth. That stranger's sense of loss and grief are the furthest things from his mind when he surges forward and rolls Yuuri beneath him, leaning down to kiss every square inch of his face. Yuuri's breath hitches at the sudden proximity and stark devotion sits bright in his eyes, as fulsome as if he's had a thousand years to make it so. One hand moves around from Viktor's back to press again his chest, right over where his heart is beating. 

"What about you?" Yuuri asks, between one kiss and the next. "Do you believe in magic?"

Viktor gazes down at the man beneath him, whose amber eyes shine close to gold in the swathe of rich sunlight falling through the open bedroom window, and thinks he's every beautiful thing in the world. Would drown in him every day forever if he could.

And that something so wonderful could be his--there isn't a better word for it, he decides, than magic. 

"I do," he says, smiling widely. "Of course I do."

Yuuri touches Viktor's face softly with the tips of his fingers, and oh, but Viktor would build his _life_ on that touch. "Well, then," Yuuri says fondly, "I'll let you believe enough for the both of us."

 

* * *

 

 

And he does.


End file.
